1st. Sunday of Advent (A)
(Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:37-44)
Advent has come round once again and I imagine that all of
us here who are mature adults will be thinking how the time since last
Christmas has flown. I really should say
the time from last Advent, but perhaps many of you would not remember the
beginning of Advent last year, whereas you will certainly remember last
Christmas: how the time has flown since then!!
People of God, I want you to think on that: how quickly the
last year has passed by! I ask you as disciples of Jesus to do this because
it is so easy for people to live their whole life and, when it comes to an end,
find themselves not only surprised -- the years having passed like a dream, as
the poet puts it – but also quite unprepared for what awaits them. That is why, in God’s Providence, the
Church’s liturgy has periods of preparation – Advent and Lent -- that recur
annually and thereby remind us: “Look, another year has gone by! How many more do you think you have? You need to prepare yourself.”
Why do we need to prepare ourselves this Advent for the
coming of the Lord? After all, most
people today, probably the great majority in our supposedly ‘sophisticated’
countries which control the world’s purse strings, think that there is no God
worth bothering about: if He is there, it doesn’t really concern us because we
are very busy and He is very good and kind, or so Church people say; They must
say that, of course; they cannot proclaim an unpopular God; He has to be good,
kind, and forgiving … otherwise we, and all the others like us, won’t be going
to Church again!! So, what do we need to
prepare for, and why do we need to prepare for it?
Dear Catholic and Christian people, let us first of all be
very clear about one supremely important
fact:
WE DO NOT KNOW WHO
WILL BE CONDEMNED, BUT WE KNOW MOST SURELY WHAT
WILL BE CONDEMNED:
orgies and drunkenness,
promiscuity and lust, rivalry and jealousy as St. Paul told us, and that
unpreparedness of which Jesus Himself spoke
in today’s Gospel:
For as it was in the days of
Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. In (those) days before the flood, they were
eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah
entered the ark. They did not know
until the flood came and carried them all away. So will it be also at the
coming of the Son of Man. Two men will
be out in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one
will be taken, and one will be left.
Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will
come.
So many want to die without having to think about religious
matters on earth or about their eternal future in the world to come: they want
to be happy and carefree concerning such matters because they like to think
that GOD IS TOO GOOD TO PUNISH ANYONE JUST FOR BEING CAREFREE AND IGNORANT OF
HIM.
Today’s readings serve to protect us wonderfully well against
such folly, against such EVIL, by reminding us of the ultimate significance of
our life here on earth and how supremely important it is for us to make good
use of the time at our disposal.
The first main theme of our readings is the joyful
expectations of those pilgrims going up to the Temple in Jerusalem:
Come, let us climb the mountain
of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that He may instruct us in His ways,
and we may walk in His paths.
We can almost feel the excitement and anticipation of those
pilgrims journeying to meet Him Who, they most firmly believe, will guide them
along the way of salvation. And surely,
our sharing in such a God-given belief, such a hope and longing, stirs up in us
a like determination and confidence as that which filled the breasts of those
ancient pilgrims, who walked along, exhorting each other with the words:
Oh, House of Jacob
come, let us walk In the light of the LORD.
Compared with them, we are -- as St. Peter said -- a
privileged People, for we have already, and in a far truer sense than those
pilgrims could ever have imagined, reached Jerusalem, the dwelling-place of the
Most High, because we have the privilege of being children of Mother
Church. For, in her, the letter to the
Hebrews (12:22-24) tells us:
You have come to Mount Zion and
to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable
company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are
registered in heaven, to God the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made
perfect, to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant.
Therefore, being so privileged, we should come -- each and
every Sunday -- with even greater joy and expectation to the house of the Lord,
that
He may instruct us in His ways, and we may walk in His paths.
Let us therefore pray now, gathered before the Lord, that
we may indeed grow in understanding of His ways and learn to walk more
steadfastly along His paths, in accordance with the second theme of our
readings today:
Stay awake! For you do not know on what day your Lord
will come.
For, not only do we not know the day of the Lord’s coming,
but we have even been warned -- quite explicitly by Our Lord Himself -- that it
will take place when we least expect it:
For, at an hour you do not expect,
the Son of Man will come.
St. Paul, that most faithful apostle of the Lord Jesus, told
us what this means for us, and how we might set about doing what Jesus requires
of us in preparation for that meeting:
It is the hour now for you to
awake from sleep. For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed;
the night is advanced, the day is at hand. Let us then throw off the works of
darkness, and put on the armour of light;
let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and
drunkenness, not in promiscuity and lust, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no
provision for the desires of the flesh.
We human beings are creatures of habit: we can do something
one way, and then, by repetition, allow it to become first of all a tendency
for us, and then finally develop into a firmly fixed habit that we do almost
instinctively. Now, in God’s Providence,
the liturgy of Mother Church each year invites, indeed, urges us, to observe
Advent as preparation for our celebration of Christmas not merely with deep
gratitude for the birth of the Messiah as the Infant of Promise but also with
firm hope and joyful preparation for His Second Coming as the Lord of
Fulfilment. She does this because, without repeated observance of such seasons
of preparation, we might easily, indeed almost inevitably, drift into a habit
of unthinking and – at the best -- merely material observance of feasts of
great moment for the Spirit at work in our lives, instead of establishing a truly
Christian habit of preparation that will enable us to appreciate, celebrate,
and profit ever more and more, from the ever enduring and constantly recurring goodness
of the Lord.
Consequently, People of God, I urge you to use this Advent
well: try to form a habit of welcoming the Lord into your life. We have a month in which to start a new
habit, or in which to strengthen a habit we have already been trying to build
up over several, perhaps many, years.
The whole point is that if we do not have a habit of recognizing, welcoming,
and gratefully responding to Jesus, a habit diligently practised and firmly
established over years, then when He comes, unexpectedly, at the end of our
days, we will find ourselves unable to welcome Him.
For, be sure, People of God, one cannot live a forgetful life and then,
when suddenly challenged, come out with the right response of appreciation and
love.
This is of great importance not only for us but with the
Lord Himself, for He has quite deliberately and explicitly told us that His
coming at the end will be unexpected, and so there will be no time to collect
our thoughts and weigh up what should be our attitude; we will find
ourselves responding instinctively, at that unprepared moment, either in
accordance with the character we have carefully built up by faithful devotion
over the years, or with that thoughtlessness and insouciance allowed to develop
over years of selfish, careless, and faithless living. And that response will, for better or for
worse, prove to be our final response and our last opportunity: a
violent person, under pressure, will react violently; a weak-willed person,
under threat, will be craven; a faithless disciple will always prove himself a
hypocrite. No wonder Jesus said (v. 46):
Blessed is that servant whom his
master on his arrival finds doing (his duty) when He comes.
Recognize yourselves, People of God: sudden trials, sudden
and unexpected threats, leave neither the time nor the ability to act in an
unaccustomed manner; in order to be found doing the Master's will when He comes
we need to have seriously formed good habits and right instinctive attitudes. Advent is an opportunity given us by Mother
Church to try to establish the supremely good habit of recognizing and welcoming
the Lord into our lives this Christmas.
Therefore, the way we prepare during the course of this Advent could be
the mirror image of our state of preparedness when He comes – suddenly -- to
settle accounts with each of us personally at the end of our time of
preparation and formation in Mother Church.
In Psalm 53 we read:
God looks down from heaven upon
the children of men, to see if there are any who understand, who seek God;
and, according to the Psalmist, He found none:
Every one of them has turned
aside; there is none who does good, no, not one. They do not call upon God.
That was the situation, even in Israel, before Jesus, Our
Lord and Saviour, came to redeem us; and that is still the situation of many today
who turn away from, reject, Jesus. They
do not acknowledge God; they do not seek or call upon Him; they have not
understood the probationary nature of their life experience on earth, where
both the wonder of God’s creation – so beautiful with all its natural powers
and sublime human potential -- and the depth of mankind’s needs seem to be so impenetrable
and irreconcilable for them.
So, dear People of God, use Advent to prepare yourself to
welcome Jesus not only this coming Christmas but whenever He might choose to
stand at the door of your soul and knock.
Try to recognize all those occasions, both great and small, clear and
only glimpsed at, where truth and beauty, goodness and love, sympathy and help,
power and fragility, fear and wonder, impinge on your consciousness and invite you
to respond to God sensed, somehow, to be present there; and may your Advent character
of awareness and appreciation, gratitude and trust, peace and joy help the
Spirit further Jesus’ Kingdom of faith, hope, and charity in your souls.
